14 DAY TRIAL // Patriot Memory has just announced the introduction of the second-generation (SE) of its Pyro solid state drives, based on a SF-2000 series SandForce SSD processor, which was designed to improve the speed of its predecessor while coming at the same aggressive price point.
Compared to the first version of the Pyro, the SE edition features higher performance synchronous NAND Flash paired together with the same SF-2281 controller.
According to Patriot, the move to the new Flash memory allowed the drive to increase its sequential read and write performance to 550MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively, which makes the Pyro SE just as fast as the OCZ Vertex 3.
Despite this modification, the speed of the Pyro SE has hardly improved over that of the previous version as this was rated by the manufacturer at 550MB/s and 515MB/s sequential read/write.
Maximum 4K random write performance remained unchanged and is estimated at 85,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
As is the case with most other SSDs, the performance of the Pyro SE drives varies according to their capacity, as smaller-sized units don't usually have all the memory channels available from the controller populated.
“The Patriot Memory Pyro SE will offer increased performance while still maintaining our aggressive pricing strategy", says William Lai, Patriot Memory's Product Manager.
"The Patriot Memory Pyro SE will be the ultimate choice for performance users looking to increase productivity while not bankrupting their budget," concluded the company's rep.
As all SandForce SF-2200-based drives, the Pyro sports a native SATA 6Gbps interface and it supports the DuraClass and DuraWrite technologies.
Unfortunately, Patriot refrained itself from providing any information regarding the release date and price of the Pyro SSD series, but we do know that two models will be available, one offering 120GB of space while the latter has a capacity of 240GB.